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How To Get Free Internet When A Stranger Uses Your Wi-fi

You can get free Internet when you let a stranger user your Karma wi-fi hotspot. Photo courtesy of Karma.

There’s probably not many of you out there who don’t have your wifi password protected. A person can only try to watch Netflixso many times to find out that someone nearby is stealing and clogging up the Internet before locking it down with a password. Internet in the days of wireless is something to be protected from thieves.But what if you wanted people to use your Internet free of charge? What if having a stranger using your wifi for free was just sharing and not stealing?

“What we’re enabling is the social element of getting connected,” said Robert Gaal, 27, the CEO of Karma. “When I’m in a cafe and there’s no wi-fi and I see someone with a laptop there’s a way for me to connect with that person.”

And that’s exactly where the idea for Karma came from. Gaal noticed that people already share hotspots, whether it’s at your home when you have guests or a stranger in a cafe needs an Internet connection.

“We wanted to take an existing behavior and make it easier to do,” Gaal said.

Basically, the Karma is a pay-as-you-go wi-fi hotspot ($14 for every gigabyte), but when your hotspot is on anyone can use it. When a stranger sees, for example, “Matt’s Karma,” that stranger clicks on the network and logs in with Facebook and can use a free 100 megabytes of bandwidth. When that stranger uses the open wi-fi network, the owner of the network gets a free 100 megabytes. And if you think you’ve found a loophole to constantly having free Internet by having a friend or roommate constantly use your Karma, you’re out of luck. You can only get the free wi-fi once per person who uses your Karma signal.

Using this social sharing wi-fi, the Karma has sold a few thousand hotspot units with the backing of investors like Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

“We’re living in a world where instead of using a resource for yourself, we’re more inclined to collaboratively consume, and it makes it that much more efficient,” Gaal said.

In the last two months Gaal said he has noticed that for every hotspot out there it is being shared with multiple people multiple times a day. And when people do use the hotspot for free they do end up becoming returning users.

These users, Gaal said, are all over the map – younger and older, but it’s the younger users who have more of a motivation to share and collaborate.

“It really fits with that generation that has grown up online and has experienced (sharing),” Gaal said. “They’re very interested in ecommerce – into what their friends are buying. You’re not just using something for yourself.”

Gaal added that younger generations have become used to solving problems online and in this situation, they are solving the problem of not being able to get online in person.But in today’s world how often are we without Internet? It’s something that I wouldn’t have considered asking only a few years ago, but today every cafe, book store even McDonald’s has free wi-fi. While there’s a pretty and useful theory around the Karma hotspot, are there many instances to use the device other than emergencies? The best place I could think of it being used is in airports and in planes, but even those now have Internet access.

With common sense telling people to keep all connections secure, Karma users might be concerned about the safety of giving total strangers access to their Internet. Gaal assured that the Karma hotspot uses the same type of Internet safeguards found in any open wifi at cafes and airports.

“Everyone who logs onto our hotspot is actually separated from anyone who has just connected,” Gaal said. “We make sure anyone who logs onto our Karma hotspot is not visible by any other person on that hotspot.”

All traffic while on the web is automatically encrypted through HTTPS, and all sharing capabilities are closed off.

These users are also protected from giving any social media information to Karma when they log on using Facebook. Gaal said when someone logs on with Facebook, the only way something would be posted to that user’s profile is if they specifically give the application permission.

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